So, the general idea is that there's this philosopher in the 17th century named Erasmus, and said philosopher works on the intersection of the mind and the physical world, trying to erase it to study the mind through the world. Somehow, this figure succeeds, and now the foundation is beginning to find Erasmus' works.

The essential concept of this SCP is qualia: How do I know that what my idea of what red "is" is your idea of what red "is"? We don't need to agree what red is "like", we ony need to agree that red is red. For this reason, language doesn't exist that can transport my red into your mind so we can figure out if the property of redness is a standard candle, or only the fact that "things are red" is the standard candle.

Erasmus apparently made a SCP to answer this question once and for all, and the answer is no. Everyone has a different red. And this scp shows that to you, makes you remember it, and from that point on you can recreate another person's idea of red in objective reality as opposed to it being only in their head. Oh, and because this visual information exists outside of your mind's understanding and perception of colour, it slowly drives you mad.

Of course, our philosopher doesn't stop there. He moves on to the ideas of "impossible colours" (You know how if you mix black and white pain, you get grey? Imagine a qorld where you got paint that is both black and white at the same time. Sounds crazy, but this is a real concept, from the real world, and under controlled conditions, it can be created.), and finally manages to create one candle that just burns in the colour of whatever it is the user is thinking of even when that idea has no property of colour. (For example, what is the colour of the word "Synechdoche"? The flame will tell you.)

Some of the effect of the final candle will be anomalous enough to bring the SCP up to euclid.

Title will probably be The Standard Candles if this doesn't exist yet.

This doesn't work from a philosophical angle: When the skip purports to show you the other guy's "red", it gives you an experience. That's your experience and it is still distinct from his. You still don't know if what you are experiencing when you observe what the skip purports to be his qualia is really what he is experiencing. Qualia are essentially private - you can't experience someone else's simply because your experience is yours and not his. It's a conceptual thing, not something that can be overcome by a magical device or even by wiring your brains together - as soon as you have an experience, it's your experience not the other guy's. Also, you can't "recreate another person's idea of red in objective reality" because colours in the qualitiative sense don't exist in objective reality - "out there", there's only light of this or that wavelength / frequency.

Yes, there are Wittgensteinian language issues involved as well - what does the word "red" refer to? It can't refer to your private experience that you call "red", for then I would have no way of knowing what quality "red" refers to. And so on…

Getting on to the "black and white pain" - that had me confused for a bit until i realised it was meant to be "paint". I thought you were talking about synaesthesia for a moment. Yes, these paints are apparantly a thing - at least, i've heard of the green/red version. But this is just a result of gaming the parts of the brain that process colour - essentially it's a matter of triggering your green-processing neurons and red-processing neurons in such a way that they simultaneously report that a part of your visual field is filled with red and green. It's a whole different thing to the "sharing qualia" issue.

Finally, 'what is the colour of the word "Synechdoche"? ' - that does sound like synaesthesia. A synaestesiast (?) might tell you that a certain word is coloured orange and tastes of vanilla - somehow their sensory inputs slide into each others' "channels", so to speak.

You first paragraph, er… I know those things are impossible. The fact that the set of candles do it anyway was the reason why Erasmus went through the trouble of using 17th century superscience or what-have-you to make them. It's their anomalous property. It's like the Marshall Carter & Dark life-transfer SCP - it should not be possible, but someone went ahead, gave the natural laws as understood by the modern world the proverbial finger, and did it anyway.

As for how it worked? The central premise is that another person's red will usually be so alien to yours that the sensation does not map to your colour space. The sensation fires when you see red, but it isn't colour as you know it; it's colour as some other person does. Then, you use the specific candle with yourself as the reference subject to put your shade of red into another person's mind. After this, both of you can recreate the those percepts in objective reality due to the central anomaly of the SCP, and you and your compatriot both create each other's reds. You point to yours as "true red" and the compatriot does the same to their own, this test can be repeated with as many subjects as you like, and can prove with a high degree of certainty that what red or any arbitrary colour is being perceived as by any number of parties is not the same. (You just really helped me refine my thinking about why the candle bases are also anomalous, so thank you for that.)

Regarding the later candles, those are part of an ongoing experiment, first to create impossible colours that do not appear in nature, which proved some point the Philosopher had, or gave further evidence, and finally, in what was probably an endavour to obtain a true understanding of what colour was (remember, this was a man operating without a theory of photons). I should mention that while it certainly can be understood as a kind of synesthesia, the effect of the final candle is special because it doesn't take internally defined concepts from the mind of the nearest individual and projects them into the viewer, but takes it from somewhere else. Regardless of who lights the candle and thinks of the colour they want it to take, if the thought is presented in the same way, it burns in a given colour every time regardless of who is "asking".

You first paragraph, er… I know those things are impossible. The fact that the set of candles do it anyway was the reason why Erasmus went through the trouble of using 17th century superscience or what-have-you to make them. It's their anomalous property. It's like the Marshall Carter & Dark life-transfer SCP - it should not be possible, but someone went ahead, gave the natural laws as understood by the modern world the proverbial finger, and did it anyway.

As for how it worked? The central premise is that another person's red will usually be so alien to yours that the sensation does not map to your colour space. The sensation fires when you see red, but it isn't colour as you know it; it's colour as some other person does. Then, you use the specific candle with yourself as the reference subject to put your shade of red into another person's mind. After this, both of you can recreate the those percepts in objective reality due to the central anomaly of the SCP, and you and your compatriot both create each other's reds. You point to yours as "true red" and the compatriot does the same to their own, this test can be repeated with as many subjects as you like, and can prove with a high degree of certainty that what red or any arbitrary colour is being perceived as by any number of parties is not the same.

I don't think you are seeing the difficulty - it's not that the candle has to flout a natural law - it goes deeper than that. It has more of the force of a law of logic, as if you wanted to write a SCP that makes A = not(A) or 1 = 2.

I don't know if you have access to academic papers but, if you do, a really good one to read for this is "What is it Like to be a Bat?" (1974) by NYU professor Thomas Nagel. Bats have a subjective experience of sonar echolocation that humans lack. Can humans ever know what this is like? No, because the very best they can do (perhaps via machines of some sort) is to have their own experience of echolocation, or their own experience of what the bat's experience of echolocation is like - everything is necessarily always filtered through their own experience. The vital part is that it is their own experience they are having, they are not having the bat's experience, and they are still denied knowledge of what the bat is experiencing. The paper is reproduced in Nagel's book Mortal Questions.

Let's look at your description (2nd para of your reply) of how it would work:

"The sensation fires when you see red, but it isn't colour as you know it; it's colour as some other person does."

Ok, you look at something that you normally experience as "red" but instead of seeing "red" you have another experience. You say that that other experience is "colour as some other person does [see red]". You have already run into the problem here: what you are experiencing is not the other person's experience of red, but (at best) your experience of what the other person's experience of red is like. Do you see? Everything you experience is necessarilyyour experience. I really can't exmphasise both "necessarily" and "your" enough.

And then vice versa - same problem.

Then "both of you can recreate the those percepts in objective reality". What does that even mean? Percepts by definition don't exist in objective reality. The best you could so is create objects that cause percepts to be perceived in someone looking at the object. So, let's say that you do that. What is it that you have created? It is a box that causes the sensation in you that you experience as the other guys experience of red. But when the other guy looks at it, what sensation does he have? He has a sensation caused by his experience of your experience of his experience of red.

Do you see it? I won't go on from here because it won't add anything to the explanation. Really, try to read Nagel's paper if you can, or Frank Jackson's Epiphenomenal Qualia and What Mary Didn't Know…

I think I understand you; I read the Nagel paper a few years back and did find it intriguing. That said, I don't think that the points he makes there render this SCP idea completely logically inconsistent, and here's why.

Nagel's point, and yours if I understand correctly, is that no being can ever experience another being's qualia because those qualia are defined in significant part by being filtered through the other being's experience. Humans can't know how a bat perceives echolocation; even if they could echolocate (and some humans can!), they're only going to have a human-filtered experience of echolocation; they have the rudiments of the same sense, but it's processed through a very, very different brain. Extrapolating that to this skip idea, the candles could never truly transfer another person's qualia, not without transferring the other person's entire experience along with it. (And if it did transfer the whole brain along with the redness, the skip article would start to tread on 158's toes.)

Okay. I follow you, and you seem to be right. What I don't see is why that renders the entire idea of this SCP moot.

So the candles can't transfer the true experience of someone else's qualia. Are they prohibited from transferring even enough of that experience to make clear its differences from one's own qualia? To extend the metaphor, the candles can't transfer the experience of "bat-ness", but can they transfer the experience of echolocation? Can they even transfer some approximation of the difference between my-red and your-red? Sure, they're still flawed if they work that way; the candles' maker partially failed in his intended task, because his intended task was logically impossible. That only makes them more interesting, from a story standpoint.

*shrug* I'm verging on the pedantic at this point, and for all I know I'm defending an idea that its originator has given up on. Regardless, I really like this idea, and I'd dearly love to see it written well.

Not giving up. One of the points of fiction, for me, anyway, if being able to explore impossible ideas. I just need to read that paper before I can give a credible reply to the post by Sirius Moonlight above this one, and I'm low on disposable time for the next day or so.

I'm certainly not suggesting you give up on the idea - I can definitely see the attraction of it. Imagine: something that lets me see what you see as "red". It's a really tempting idea. Here's a way maybe you could make it work, but it relies on a fairly unpopular view of how the mind works, called the homunculus theory. See Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a discussion (Dennett attacks the homunculus view): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

So, on the homunculus theory, your brain does its processing of info transmitted from the eyes down the optic nerves and when it is done, it presents you with the finished picture of what you are looking at. But this assumes that "you" are like a homunculus sitting in there somewhere watching what the brain presents to you as if you are watching a movie or something. Most philosophers these days don't go for that. But assume it's true. Then maybe someone else's movie could be displayed to you sitting there in your head. You see how ridiculous the homunculus theory starts to sound, but hey, maybe it's one way you could go.

The homunculus theory, btw, is based upon a Cartesian dualistic view of humans, where we are in fact body and soul, these being distinct substances. It's an idea that is also central to most religions - any system of thought that posits a soul that persists after physical death, in fact. I still have severe doubts that it can be made to hold together, but…

…maybe just waffle over the philosophical issues altogether and present your scp as a fait accompli…After all, it's a fiction site, not a philosophy site…

Yeah, something along those lines, but the problem is deeper than simply the fact that the human brain is very different to the bat brain, although that is certainly a problem in itself - but scifi tends to ride roughshod over this sort of thing, as when Vulcans mind-meld with radically alien species in Star Trek.

The problem I am talking about would also apply to someone and his clone: Experience is essentially private. We might want to surmise that someone and his clone have exactly the same experience of red, but we could only assert that on a priori grounds and never verify it empirically, as these candles would allow.

Um… boiled down, this basically is just some candles that make you go insane when you look at them (also, the Euclid classification would only be necessary if it was hard to contain the candles. If you put the candle in a box and you're pretty sure it won't try to escape on its own, it's Safe. Item classes are based on difficulty of containment, not potential danger level).

Also, the idea of different color perception in itself seems like it'd be kind of hard to present in an article. Humans actually have relatively simple eyesight compared to, say, butterflies or the mantis shrimp. Keep in mind that as the author, you know the entire story, but the Foundation needs to have discovered what it knows about the SCP through observation and experimentation. How would someone without any prior knowledge of the candle discover the tie to Erasmus?

To quote vezaz, "Get away from "type of object" or "sort of creature" and instead start thinking about stories you want to tell. Start looking for moments in your everyday life that give you pause, that are unusual, or that make you go off into a daydream. Then think about bringing the reader to that same moment." Why does it have to be a candle? Is the significance of the candle central to the piece? You can go for some detailed backstory with the Erasmus connection and the thought experiment itself; having the item essentially be a candle that makes people crazy rather undermines everything else.

At the moment, there are some workable ideas here, but it seems like a conglomerate of unrelated effects.

Well, I could certainly kill the absolute rule of degradation, although viewing another person's qualia should (by the nature of it's impossibility to integrate) never be a "huh. Well, all right then." sort of experience for most people.

Euclid comes from the after-effect of a particularly stupid experiment with the last candle that causes it to cross that threshold. Honestly, If I really think about it, it should be Keter, but I don't want it to be so I'll have to tone some part of it down.

I probably should have mentioned that the candles were to be found with a treatise concerning ideas that Erasmus discovered after making them. Sort of does the critical job of explaining where he intersects the story. The significance of the candles isn't central to the piece, but I plan to have anything I write created by Erasmus to be created with period-appropriate materials. Further, light is the most intuitive way for me to write a story involving qualia. I could try sound, but I think the only people who'd be able to intuitively understand what I was getting at would be those who have had cochlear implants… implanted. It also allows me to use what I feel is a clever title considering the overall concept and context.

Human brains are excessively good at integrating sensory input and altering themselves to new situations. Seeing red as a different color you haven't seen before would be weird (and probably awesome) for a few days at most, and then it would be "huh, alright then". More likely, you'd get that effect after a couple of hours.

I think the idea is interesting enough without tacking on "and then you go nuts". It's just a cliche, and doesn't really make sense with the described effect.

Also if this is a candle who you need to actually lit to get the effect and it doesn't break out of its box, hunt you down, and light itself in front of you, then it's safe whether you turn insane or not. Safe is defined as "if we put it in a box and don't touch it, it doesn't do anything." Nuclear weapons are Safe, by Foundation standards.

And that's my failure in description, I suppose. I'm not talking "red as a different colour", I'm talking "colour as an entirely alien perceptual object". So it's not "seeing red as indigo", but seeing red as another individual's internal representation of red, which, though arranged completely differently, fundamentally means the same thing, so you have full recognizance that the object is red, but simultaneously perceive it as red/another-red, and the other red does not map to colour space, or sound pitches, or any other sense because it was not developed within your own mind, and the structure and biases of the brain and beliefs that create it.

Most of the candles are Safe. The Euclid/Keter comes from the last candle the philosopher produced, which takes on the objective colour of anything in imagination. Because of a particularly stupid test, the Candle ended up gaining additional properties, and now needs to be contained in a dewar flask of liquid helium because it will ignite in anything else, and instead of burning down and out, burns up, and increases in intensity - and the starting intensity is hard X-Rays. Like I said, too Keter for my tastes, since if left on its own, the logical consequence is it reaches the intensity of a gamma ray burst, kills the earth, and never stops growing.

So it's not "seeing red as indigo", but seeing red as another individual's internal representation of red, which, though arranged completely differently, fundamentally means the same thing, so you have full recognizance that the object is red, but simultaneously perceive it as red/another-red, and the other red does not map to colour space, or sound pitches, or any other sense because it was not developed within your own mind, and the structure and biases of the brain and beliefs that create it.

There's no reason this would necessarily make a person go insane. (People habituate to extremely disturbing stimuli all the time, without breaking their entire cognitive architecture; just ask anyone who can function despite severe chronic pain.) That said, it might very well break a person's visual-perceptual architecture — or perhaps do something much stranger than "breaking". I'm no neurologist, but I am well aware of neural plasticity; what would happen to a person who used this candle even once or twice, but then got used to it, and integrated these perceptions of somebody else's red? What does a visual cortex look like once it's remapped itself to handle stimuli that are literally alien?

How does that person see the world? What effect does that have on their capacity for empathy? Do they rapport better with people whose experience of red — or pain, proportion, beauty, anything — they have integrated, or do they recoil from the strangeness of it and retreat into near-sociopathy or solipsism? (Admittedly, solipsism would be a hell of a hard position to justify when you have such inarguable evidence of others' perceptions, but people have an incredible capacity for cognitive dissonance.) How do different people react differently?

There's a hell of a lot of story potential just in that bit there. Causing insanity or planetary irradiation would, in my opinion, be a melodramatic distraction from the bizarre, disconcerting consequences of the candle's basic effect.

(In case it wasn't obvious by now, I think that at its base this idea is fantastic and loaded with potential. It's going to be tough to pull off, but the fact that you're seeking feedback — and engaging it thoughtfully and articulately — gives me great hope for your ability to do it. :D This is gonna be awesome.)